SOURCE: Schrank, Bernice. “Popular Culture and Political Consciousness in Mavis Gallant's My Heart Is Broken.” Essays on Canadian Writing 42 (winter 1990): 57-71.

In the following essay, Schrank examines the influence of popular media on the characters of My Heart Is Broken, highlighting its effects on their flaws, development, and motives.

Although My Heart Is Broken includes some of Mavis Gallant's best and most frequently anthologized stories, it has received little critical attention. This is not as it should be, given the collection's technical subtlety and political sophistication. Like Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio, and In Our Time, My Heart Is Broken invites analysis as a unified whole, a work whose meaning and impact derive from the interpenetration of its seemingly discrete and independent parts. Taken together, these short stories create a longer, more complex narrative, different in implication from any single fiction in the collection. Framed by Lily Littel's hankering after...